Why we must profile airline passengers
Philip Baum is the editor of Aviation Security International and the managing director of Green Light Limited, an aviation security training and consultancy company based in London. The opinions expressed are his own.
Whenever an individual manages to circumvent the security system designed to protect our airports, airlines and the people who use them, we ask why our countermeasures failed. And yet the real problem lies in our determination to screen everybody in exactly the same way using technologies that are not fit for purpose.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year old alleged perpetrator of the Christmas Day attack, should have been identified as a potential threat to the flight both in Lagos and again in Amsterdam. Here was a passenger who had bought an expensive ticket in cash in a country different to that of his port of embarkation or his intended destination, was traveling without any checked luggage for a two-week trip over the Christmas period, and about whom some agencies, and his father, had security concerns. It’s not rocket science we need; it’s the deployment of common sense.
Regrettably, regulators are loath to implement international profiling standards that would screen different passengers in different ways, for fear of being branded politically incorrect. Profiling is a risk analysis of a person or situation carried out by a trained, streetwise workforce. In terms of passengers, the aim is to analyze their appearance and behavior, along with their travel documents, and determine to what extent they meet our expectations for international air travel. The key advantage of profiling is that it responds to future threats as well as to those of the past and enables us to then select the right technology to screen passengers with. We are not going to ask all passengers to undergo a through-body X-ray, however safe such technologies are, but we could use the technology to screen those we have concerns about.
Detractors of profiling claim that decisions will be racially motivated, that we will start picking on young Asian men and that all Muslim passengers will be treated unfairly. Yet, the best examples of profiling actually working have identified people who do not meet such a stereotype. Anne-Marie Murphy, a pregnant Irish woman identified as a potential threat to an El Al flight in 1986, is the best example – and she certainly did not fit the terrorist stereotype. As a result the 1.5 kg Semtex-based device concealed in her bag was identified.
The limited degree of profiling that is currently done has been proven to work, when it is properly applied and enforced by trained staff. Richard Reid, the “shoe-bomber,” was identified as a possible threat on 21st December 2001 and refused boarding; he returned the next day and managed to board. The Chechen Black Widows responsible for the downing of two Russian airliners in 2004, each carrying explosive charges on (or possibly in) their bodies, were initially refused boarding. They paid bribes to be accepted, with tragic results.
It is up to security trainers to ensure that profiling decisions are based on logic rather than race, religion or skin color. In any case, aviation security is about preventing perpetrators of all acts of unlawful interference with civil aviation, such as unruly passengers, criminals and asylum seekers, not only terrorists, from boarding aircraft. Employers, meanwhile, will have to ensure that the screeners they employ have the requisite skill-set with which to perform their duties.
Profiling should be no different than any medical scan. Terrorism has many of the same traits as a disease, in this case a disease of civilization. Preventing, finding, and removing these infectious cells can be similar to doing it with real cells. We don’t cat-scan or x-ray everyone, just those with symptoms.
Look at all the countries that quickly banned imports from countries that reported Mad Cow disease, Swine flu, and Bird flu, for example. Russia and China instantly began quarantining travelers with any symptoms, even those that sat within 10 feet of anyone with symptoms. They had fever scanners set up. Russia immediately banned imports of pigs from the U.S. and Mexico. The list goes on. The point is that diseases scare the hell out of people, and they often overreact. But the result is that the originating country, where the disease started, is the one put under tremendous pressure to deal with the problem, and then prove to the world they are OK. The burden shifted to them, not the importing country.
The same logic should, and eventually will prevail with terrorists, which are spawned, bred, trained, educated, and knowingly allowed to walk proudly in their country of origin. If they succeed, they become martyrs. Those countries should be treated like intentional “carriers” and “breeding grounds” for this new disease. It should become the responsibility for those country’s leaders – national, tribal, or family – to find and remove this problem for the survival of their own country. The cost should be shifted to them.
Any country that condones terrorism in any way, should be blacklisted and their travelers put automatically into a separate screening process. Besides all of the other logical clues for screening, mostly physical, national origin should therefore be key. Hate to say it, but the U.K. has allowed itself to also become a breeding ground for terrorists. We know the terms “Londonistan” and “Eurabia.” In any case, it’s better to implement tough profiling now as a security measure instead of waiting until we are hit with a full lockdown, when the problem becomes an overreaction, harder to fix, and economically much more costly.